@scandi – thanks for proving that the Daily Mail is good at targeting mindless dimwits; the study in question suggests that all the soot emitted by China has acted to cool the atmosphere – i.e., it would have been even warmer had it not been for China’s pollution . . . just as was demonstrated post 9-11 when all flights over the US were cancelled thus cancelling out the cooling effect of the pollutants; in the meantime, while morons of the world swallow whatever Lord Monckton, oh he of let’s quarantine a million Brits, spews on them, businessmen and entrepreneurs are building huge mines in the Arctic that were previously off limits due to too much ice: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/04/lakshmi-mittal-arctic-iron-ore

Too funny that Lakshmi is building an entire friggin’ city with tankers coming in every 32 hours ALL YEAR where previously the ice was there all year; once again . . . deniers prove themselves to be like primitive men – “the earth is flat and thar be monsters on that side of the world we can know nothing about” . . . all these mines and cities built in the Arctic will be mirages for half the American and evangelical populations ; that will be an amusing thing to see what excuse they come up with for this mirage

My god, the number of morons out there is just staggering..And the cruelty implied in the crap reported is just exhasperating. News that serves one interest or another is simply crap by definition. People are so religious in so many ways once you see it, religious in absorbing crap that gives their tummy a stir..

Dr. Gebhard Kirchgaessner, an economics professor at St. Gallen University. “But it won’t have any real effect on the economy. It seems incredible to imagine that there are people out there willing to buy millions of these things.”
~ yes someone with a Phd in economics would, but even a hill tribe Asian who has never been to school knows the value of gold & silver.

“I got rid of my coins a while ago,” said Esther Heusser, a social worker in Jona, Switzerland. “I just didn’t want to think about where they came from.”
~ the gold came from a fucking star you moron, just like silver, and whether the atoms of gold just recently came out of the ground or came out of some poor bugger’s mouth they would have been mixed with trillions of other gold atoms in various forms, all of which have existed since some long dead star blew its load all over our galaxy.

@Mother Earth – it’s called agnotologic capitalism; I don’t mind if someone wants to wallow in their own ignorance, go ahead but wallow in their own backyard, I am so bored of people trying to convince me to be as ignorant as they are; I wish I could be, for I do believe that – though usually not – ignorance is, indeed, sometimes bliss; in this case, it would be blissful

@F.Beard – Max is trying to make a progressive case for gold backed money; unfortunately, the left, liberal and progressive classes refuse to accept a progressive reason and mock gold as a currency instead; this is as moronic as people pointing to the melting Arctic icecaps and saying the earth is entering a new iceage; it is merely ignorance but their ignorance is not my fault, nor is the far right wing understanding the role of gold as a currency in anyway a reason to negate the 5000 year reality of this fact – just as a banker having the idea of a carbon credit does not negate the scientific reality of climate change, global warming, AGW, whichever word most aids the denier’s agnotologic shark jump, “oooooh there’s a conspiracy! you see there is the proof in her word!!!!!!!!! Weeeeeeeehheeeee, I looooooooooovvvvvvvvve jumping sharrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkkkkkkkksssss!”

Gold Swiss Franc? Are the Swiss crazy?
They don’t watch TV and see what is happening to Lybia because of its gold Dinar project?
Or will the US empire spare Switzerland because of it not being in the middle east, Arab, terrorist?

hmmm, one big ass ball of confusion. looks like things are getting that much closer to a gold standard, fascism to some (f beard). freedom to others? is that the wrong thing to think? agw! some people will pull the hair out over this, some people will fall in line with one camp or the other (is hotter or is it colder) some will take note and spread their ideas of what it is and what it isnt, articles , pictures(worth a thousand words), charts, scientific data, NATURAL occurances and what ever else. to be in denial about it is like saying your breath doesnt smell like shit in the morning and it never has… now sprinkle some religon in there and what do you get? god made me do it? the talking turd of the US will be speaking today, will you listen? buy silver you’ll feel better about youself

You like myself make the same mistake some times. Responding to ignorance is a waste of time with all the information provided on your site if some one can not add 1 + 1 = 2 let them waste their time and worthless energy.

People use their beliefs as membership cards, to feel cozy with like minded morons. I think given the availability of wine and sigars, its much wiser not to joing the most generic clubs and take a mental vacation every now and then..

On the other hand I suspect some of my high earning friends to actively inject idiocy and racism. A bit like dumping garbage anywhere but home..

There is one way for the gold franc to be a credible money and currency and that is for it to not be backed by gold but made of gold. It should have a specified weight and fineness and be legal tender and denominated not by standard swiss francs but by its weight in gold to determine its value or buying power.

It should have a specified weight and fineness and be legal tender and denominated not by standard swiss francs but by its weight in gold to determine its value or buying power. Steven Rowlandson [bold added]

LOL! IF gold is money then why does it have to be legal tender?! People should be perfectly free to use anything (including gold, silver or locks of Stacy’s hair ) for private debts but any attempt to make anything but the government’s fiat legal tender for government debt is an attempt to run a scam.

Yeah, yourright but man’s healthy cash position seems to atrack fresh flesh. That’s why you see ugly man with beautiful woman. You see smart man with dumb pretty woman but you don’t see smart woman with dumb man. Smart woman have smart man.

1st off .. I love the old school names that Stacy uses ( dingbat ) Dimwits .. More please .. It makes my morring . Max has not gone off with any good rants for a bit so I was starting to get worred about the ” edge “. In eed my daily I M F hookers and fat fucks of Gov: from Mr Max-o-millon I do respect you lady like way Stacy of not useing Harsh corndog trucker talk : )
As for Golden Franks .. Yummy .. I think that will throw another spike in the market drive up gold once more.

I inserted the letter e just to see if people like you that did not have better things to do but correct spelling would react. And of course it worked and by the way the letter e in Stacy,s name is for EXCELLENT.

Maybe I am missing something, but what is this “progressive case” for gold backed money? Is it something that has never been here before? Because if not, then there is nothing really progressive about it, is there; yes, there is a several thousands of years of tradition thinking that shiny things are nice, yet when it comes down to gold (backed of physical) based economies, the triumphs have been scarce. A tradition, even if a long one, is a poor argument in favour of anything. And calling those who might have an opposing view as idiots doesn’t help either.

I don’t have anything against gold, after all it is a nice shiny metal, however, so far I have not heard (or read) convincing reasons for its supposed superiority. Let me repeat myself here: a system (X) has certain effects (Y), if we don’t like those effects, we have to change the system. To think that gold will change anything is to think that we can change the direction of causality, i.e., from Y to X.

@F. Beard

I read the article about MMT and must say that some things don’t make much sense to me. it is said that the issuing of bonds is a remnant of the previous gold standard. This seems strange as – as far as I know – the so called gold standard was a fraud-> not enough gold to back up the issued reserve notes. This means that the US wrote IOUs not for gold but for, again, only pieces of paper. If the government could write an IOU in exchange a reserve note (or a deposit), it could equally well write the reserve note (without the debt attached) itself. And if it was a fraud before, how it is not one now?

To say that the US cannot really default, that it is necessarily solvent because it can create its own money, seems also strange to me in the sense that why is there the need – or is it just smoke and mirrors – to service the interest on the debt. It is a huge drain, wasteful, doesn’t create anything of value, etc., I mean if it is not really necessary.

Thirdly, in this model the Fed is considered as a federal institution when it isn’t really. To say that it listens to the treasury doesn’t mean it is a federal institutions. A seeming co-operation doesn’t say much as the treasury could very well listen to the Fed. Or more likely that both organisations are hijacked by the privileged class which is just making sure that no repairs will ever be done.

Ok, I suppose that technically it can be said that the money is created by the government, however, in my view that is a huge stretch of the concept.

Good points. I recommend that people study MMT but I don’t fully support it. For instance, MMT assumes that the current government-banking relationship should be maintained. But that is fascism. The government has no need for banks and as for the private sector why should some people be allowed to steal purchasing power from their neighbours?

It is the debt based monetary system that is the problem, whether it is fiat or gold debt based. We are now so over-indebted that if you pay back just 12% of all the debt owed, there is no money circulating in society at all…whether fiat or gold…and still a large debt unpaid.

And, silver coins like all coins that are minted by the government, should circulate permanently. The “Wizard of Oz” used the metaphor of Silver Shoes to get back home safely, as gold at the time was used in a debt based monetary system by “goldbug” bankers to the detriment of people, farmers and businesses. And, the “yellow brick road” was a metaphor for gold with the end of the journey’s goal being the Emerald City-Greenback dollars–backed by Silver (although it is not absolutely necessary to be backed by silver, see “The Secret of Oz” by Bill Still http://www.secretofoz.com/ ). Public banks and their wealth based money add permanently circulating debt free money into society to create greater jobs, economic activity and to help all people to prosper much more than under a debt based system running out of money with debt still owed.
………

We no longer have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” We have a government run by and for Big Business, and Big Business has gotten control because its affiliated banks have monopolized the business of issuing the national money supply, a function the Constitution delegated solely to Congress. What hides behind the banner of “free enterprise” today is a system in which giant corporate monopolies have used their affiliated banking trusts to generate unlimited funds to buy up competitors, the media, and the government itself, forcing truly independent private enterprise out. Big private banks are allowed to create money out of nothing, lend it at interest, foreclose on the collateral, and determine who gets credit and who doesn’t. They can advance massive loans to their affiliated corporations and hedge funds, which use the money to raid competitors and manipulate markets. If some players have the power to create money and others don’t, the playing field is not “level” but allows some favored players to dominate and coerce others. These giant cartels can be brought to heel only by cutting off their source of power – the power to create money — and returning it to its rightful sovereign owners, the people themselves.

Two independent monetary systems have competed for dominance in the United States ever since we were a collection of colonies. In provincial America, paper money was issued by local governments. In England at the same time, paper banknotes were issued and lent privately by banks, headed by the Bank of England, the first private central bank. The major flaw in the private banking system was that the banks created the principal but not the interest necessary to pay back their loans, so more money was always owed back than was put into the money supply, requiring more loans to be taken out to cover the interest, spiraling the people into debt.The most effective and efficient of the American colonial systems was in Pennsylvania, where a publicly-owned bank issued paper money and lent it to farmers. The money returned to the government with interest, preventing inflation; and to keep enough money in the system to prevent the debt spiral of the private banking system, the government issued and spent a sum of money on public works as well. The Pennsylvania system worked so well that it completely funded the provincial government without taxes or inflation. Benjamin Franklin and others maintained that the chief reason for the American Revolution was that Parliament forbade the colonies from issuing their own money. Paper money issued by the Revolutionary government got the colonists through the war, but the British heavily counterfeited the Continental currency as a deliberate war tactic, and by the end of the war it had been inflated so much that it was nearly worthless. Fear of inflation led the Continental Congress to completely omit paper money from the Constitution, which does not say who can issue it or under what circumstances. The private banks filled the breach, and by 1913 the U.S. had the same private central banking system that England had. Ever since the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, all of our money except coins and a few rare U.S. Notes has been created privately by banks (including the private Federal Reserve) and lent to the government and the people. Two centuries after the Revolution was fought, the pyramid scheme of lending 10 dollars and requiring 11 back has reached its mathematical limits. We are “all borrowed up” and the banking system is imploding. It is time we tried the system for which our forefathers fought and died: real, debt-free, publicly-issued U.S. money. This tack would not only not add to inflation but could actually reduce or eliminate it. Inflation results from an increase in “demand” (money) over “supply” (goods and services). Today inflation is caused by borrowing to repay debt: the money created into existence by banks goes to pay interest rather than to produce goods and services. If the government were to issue money and use it to pay for real goods and services (roads and bridges, sustainable energy development, health services, and the like), demand and supply would remain in balance and inflation would not result. The “Federal” Reserve is actually a privately-owned corporation that issues money and lends it to the government. A truly federal central bank would issue funds directly to the Treasury as debt-free U.S. Notes, or as “national credit.” This was done successfully in Australia and New Zealand during the 1930s and 1940s. A state-owned central bank funded public projects that put people back to work, at a time when most of the rest of the world was struggling with a depression brought on by a global shortage of bank-created money. Today we are facing the same sort of bank-created credit crisis, and it could be resolved in the same way. Steps Congress might take include:1. Amending the Federal Reserve ActFederal Reserve Act to make the Federal Reserve a truly federal agency, acting under the auspices of Congress in conjunction with the Treasury.

2. Updating the Constitutional provision that “Congress shall have the exclusive power to coin money [and] regulate the value thereof” to read, “Congress shall have the exclusive power to create the national currency in all its forms, including not only coins and paper dollars but the nation’s credit issued as commercial loans; and it shall not delegate this power to any private entity.”

3. Authorizing new issues of federal legal tender backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States,” to be spent on programs that promoted the general welfare. To prevent inflation, this currency would be advanced only for programs that contributed new goods and services to the economy, keeping supply in balance with demand. Issues of the new currency would also be capped by some ceiling — the unused productive capacity of the national work force, or the difference between the Gross Domestic Product and the nation’s purchasing power (wages and spendable income).

4. Advancing credit interest-free to state and local governments, for rebuilding infrastructure and other public projects. The emphasis would be on projects that were self-sustaining, such as the development of cheap, effective alternative sources of energy (wind, solar, ocean wave, etc.) that could be sold to the public for a fee; or the repurchase of homes in default, to be resold or rented as low-income housing.

5. Establishing a network of national banks to serve as local bank branches of the newly-federalized banking system, either by FDIC takeover of currently insolvent banks or by the purchase of viable banks with newly-issued U.S. currency. Besides serving depository banking functions, these national banks would be authorized to service the credit needs of the public by advancing the national credit as loans. Any interest charged on advances of this credit would be returned to the Treasury, to be used in place of taxes.

6. Authorizing the Treasury to buy back and retire the federal government’s outstanding debt as it comes due, using newly-issued U.S. Notes or Federal Reserve Notes. In most cases this could be done online, without physical paper transfers.

7. Regulation and control of the exploding derivatives crisis, either by imposing a modest .25 percent Tobin tax on all derivative trades in order to track and regulate them, or by imposing an outright ban on derivatives trading. If the handful of banks responsible for 97 percent of all derivative trades were found after audit to be insolvent, they could be put into receivership and their derivative trades could be unwound by the FDIC as receiver.

8. Initiating a new round of international agreements modeled on the Bretton Woods Accords, addressing the following monetary issues among others:

— The pegging of national currency exchange rates to the value either of an agreed-upon standardized price index or an agreed-upon “basket” of commodities;

— International regulation of, or elimination of, speculation in derivatives, short sales, and other forms of trading that are used to manipulate markets;

— Interest-free loans of a global currency issued Greenback-style by a truly democratic international congress, on the model of the Special Drawing Rights of the IMF; and

— The elimination of burdensome and unfair international debts. This could be done by simply writing the debts off the books of the issuing banks, reversing the sleight of hand by which the loan money was created in the first place.Just as we need publicly-operated police, courts and laws to keep individual and corporate predators at bay, so we need a system of truly national banks, in which the power to create the money and advance the credit of the people is retained by the people. We trust government with sweeping powers to declare and conduct wars, provide for the general welfare, and establish and enforce laws. We should trust it to create the national money supply in all its forms. The federal government need not and should not go into debt. A government with a properly designed and monitored system of publicly-issued money could fund itself without taxes, debt or inflation.